If a car has no drain plug for a fluid service that has to be performed several times a year, or can't handle a simple battery replacement without squawking, then the manufacturer is doing something wrong. Either their engineering is terrible or they're assholes.
A good English friend of mine once told me all about how common it is to find cars there which have no user serviceable parts at all. The hood doesn't open, you can't check, let alone change the oil. I have no idea how long these cars last, but I know they couldn't last forever without some kind of service. Brakes have to be relined periodically, for starters, at a bare minimum.
We gots them too. If'n you call them town car folks 'round here that feller picks you up in a four-door dualie with "POWERED BY CUMMINS" wrote across the back winder. If you pay extra, that feller takes a hose to wash off most of the cow shit before he picks you up.
If you're only going to speak a paltry three languages, English, Spanish, and French make a good trio.
Thinking about this reminds me of the day a German-born guy from Québec, three Africans from three different countries, and I all came together one day to find common ground in our mutually mangled French. That basically proves the point underlying the graphic and the article right there.
So I got this beak installed, and now I'm having trouble playing the trumpet. What's the solution?
No, they couldn't find the entire wealth of their employees in their couch cushions. It is impossible to find a negative amount of money. Their employees total wealth is a very large debt which most of them will never be able to pay off.
What's even more irritating is that the richest and largest company in the world staffs itself through subsidies that come out of your pocket and mine. Most of the people working there are barely scraping by, and when the hours get cut after Christmas, they go file for welfare and unemployment benefits to supplement their meager income. People can afford to work there because we make up for their pathetic salary through taxes. This seriously pisses me off.
Then I said that that makes me sad. I forgot to mention that it makes me sad because the further apart we are, the more difficult finding and talking to each other are.
On the bright side, if we did find intelligent life out there, we would immediately launch into action doing something nasty to them. They're better off not knowing us, and if they're like us, we're probably better off not knowing them too. Good fences make good neighbors.
Thats nice, except Facebook tags them anyway because of their use of facial recognition.
I can't imagine somebody on Facebook posting a picture that includes me. Possibly this is because I have no social life.
Even if all of Mars was habitable, it would only add one quarter additional Earth surface. But it isn't. And the rest of the solar system is even less hospitable than Mars.
That's why in the long run, we've got to get out of the solar system and plant colonies somewhere else. Mars isn't an interesting end destination, but getting to Mars would help pave the way to start sending colonies out to all those exoplanets we keep discovering, and hoping one of them is habitable.
This may actually be impossible. I've been working up a novel whose premise was a completely believable last ditch survival shot at colonizing the stars with as little new technology as possible. What if some dinosaur killer event is going to happen in the present time, and we've got to just get it done? My novel stalled out, because I'm going to have to invent far more magic than I wanted to make this remotely believable. The problems are immensely daunting, and we're nowhere close to being able to solve them.
We might never solve them. If we don't, our extinction is 100% guaranteed unless some friendly space faring neighbors give us a lift off of this rock. We won't go extinct in the foreseeable future, probably, but it's inevitable that we will go extinct eventually.
Much as we are hard wired to kill our neighbors, fuck their women, and take all their shit, we are hard wired to survive. We want to live forever, which is why we have invented so many religions that allow us to pretend that we get to do just that. To anyone who truly understands the inevitability of the sun going red giant and scorching our home planet, remaining entirely on this one rock runs counter to the innate human survival instinct, and the innate raping and plundering instinct. Thinking about how to get us off this rock isn't a flight of fantasy, it's a compulsion, and the most critically important problem we need to solve in the long run to ensure our version of eternity for ourselves.
Do we accept extinction, or do we figure out how to get this done? Personally, I don't want to accept extinction. A very small minority of us have enough foresight to agree, while the vast majority are playing shuffleboard on the poop deck of the Titanic saying the sun will be around forever and ever, and anyway, Jesus will save us, so why invest in all this crazy space fantasy when we could be spending money on yachts and luxury cars instead?
The most hackable car is obviously the Adobe. You can hack it into damn near anything.
People Eating Tasty Animals says hell yeah. I'm sure there's a big market for mammoth if we resurrect the species, and I'm sure nothing could go wrong, like them turning into velociraptors or something.
Besides, just think of the absolutely ridiculous new cartridges you'll be able to buy. Shoulder-fired artillery, just like our ancient ancestors used to use on mammoth hunts. Flint spear, 1000 grain projectile flying at 4,000 fps, they're almost totally the same thing!
And besides, if we resurrect an ice age species at the peak of global warming, we'll have to hunt them back into extinction so they don't die from heat exhaustion! Win!
(As an aside, I find it really awkward that I'm a long-time treehugger who has actually started hunting normal game for food purposes with reasonable rounds. I'm serious about eating these things and I'm still a snarky hippie wannabe making fun of hunting generally too. I think I'm finally schizophrenic now. I've been working on it for a long time. Next up, I should go beat up a homo and then have sex with a dude.)
I heard the big news that this Steam thingie was coming to Linux. Wow, now we have games! I haven't played games since I left Windows, in 2001. Cool.
So I installed the Steam thingie, and I dug through hundreds of games that looked sort of maybe interesting. None of them ran on Linux. Then I figured out how to find the Linux games. There was some stuff there, $10 here, $15 there, but I had no idea what any of that crap was, or whether it would even work. I continued digging until I found a game that kind of sort of maybe possibly looked like it could be interesting, and it was free.
I installed it, and got a black screen. My computer isn't foofy enough to run that game. Or any game, apparently.
After thinking about it for awhile, I realized I would never get anything done if I started wasting time playing games. I used to play games when I only worked 30-40 hours a week, but I haven't played one since the Wii came out. I bought exactly one game for the Wii, and they never did release a second game for that platform that looked interesting. I never played anything on the PS2 after the last Spyro game.
Games suck.
My son disagrees. He grew up on Linux pretty much from his first real experience using a computer. He's almost as good with Linux as I am. He bought a ridiculously impressive $2,000 gaming machine with teragigas and petaflops and stuff. He tried Steam. He bought a copy of Windows 7 to install on that thing.
There you go. Linux != games, but we will always have Tuxracer until the end of time.
I spent a lot of time pondering this very thing recently. After considering all the problems that have to be solved for a one-way mission to Mars or anywhere else, I have to conclude we're probably going to go extinct on this rock one day, unless we develop radically magic technology.
So what if any precautions would you take for jet fuel that you wouldn't take for say petrol or methanol or other common flammable liquids?
The main thing is that if the tank is ever used to haul any of those other common flammable liquids, you can't load jet fuel onto it. Every last scrap of the transport pathway has to be dedicated 100% to jet fuel, down to the last gasket. There are extra security and training requirements too.
"No matter where you go, there you are..." -- Buckaroo Banzai
